Indonesia’s International Airport to Get Some Relief

It’s not just the roads in Indonesia that are overwhelmed with traffic. So is Jakarta’s international airport.

So, to reduce some of the burden, Jakarta’s much-smaller Halim Perdanakusuma Airport will welcome commercial flights by September, the state-owned operator announced Tuesday.

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“We can fly 6,000 passengers from the Halim Perdanakusuma airport per day, including for the Hajj pilgrimage [to Mecca],” Salahuddin Rafi, the director of airport and technology development of airport operator PT Angkasa Pura II, told reporters Tuesday on the sidelines of an aviation conference in Jakarta.

The smaller airport, located in the eastern outskirts of Jakarta, is used for chartered and military flights. Under its new orders, it will be able to accommodate 14 Boeing 747-300 jets at once and handle 21 take-offs and landings per hour. The airport won’t need major changes to handle its new role, Mr. Rafi added.

The company is expanding the international airport — Soekarna-Hatta Airport – which handles about 150,000 passengers daily, or more than double its capacity of 60,000 people. The $2 billion expansion to triple the capacity of the country’s main airport is one of more than 20 Indonesian projects to build new or upgrade existing airports.

The number of domestic and international passengers in Indonesia has been rising robustly in recent years due to the operations of low-cost carriers in the country, such as AirAsia Indonesia and Lion Air, and the growth of the middle-income class. A scarcity of bridges, trains and ferries sometimes makes air travel the only mode of transportation in the 17,000-island archipelago.

The government predicts the number of airline passengers will increase by 12% this year after growing 15% to 72.2 million passengers last year.

The boom in the civil aviation industry, however, has taken its toll. A string of fatal accidents in the last decade prompted the European Union placed Indonesia on its list of countries and carriers unsafe for flying.

Last month, a new Boeing 737-800 operated by Lion Air crashed on water, short of the runaway at the Bali’s airport. All of the 101 passengers and seven crew members survived.

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Indonesia Real Time provides analysis and insight into the region, which includes Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Brunei. Contact the editors at SEAsia@wsj.com.

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